New Music – David Collier – Smacht

Irish Composer David Collier has just released an album by the name of Smacht on the Ergodos label. It’s a collection of three songs with Smacht featuring twice (one remix) along with another track Dusk. Smacht itself is a piece for string quartet that grows from a simple beginning into a delicately layered affair.

You can find out more about the album here and also hear a section of it below.

This debut release from David Collier is an engrossing sweep of the Irish composer’s recent work. The nuanced and expansive meditations of the string quartet Smacht are presented together with the pulsating brilliance of Dusk, a dazzling work for four percussionists. Collier’s compositions – sharp-focussed and sincere – radiate warmth and vitality, and are presented in a vinyl edition with artwork by Louise Gaffney.

RTÉ lyric fm’s Bernard Clarke has praised the record on Nova, lyric fm’s weekly new music programme:

“…this music is ingenious, inventive and actually full of tension despite the seeming serene focus. The nuance of touch and timbre are brilliant and that timelessness … that frozen quality of the combination of sometimes busy surface and slowly unfolding structure, that is bewitching here. Momentum and stasis.”